


Can't Stop This Feeling

by Linsky



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Still Hockey Players, Angst, First Time, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pining, Sort Of, The Giver AU, sexual awakening, so much denial of emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 03:10:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12423846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: Jonny’s never had a problem with his pills before. There’s a reason his teammates call him Captain Zen.





	Can't Stop This Feeling

**Author's Note:**

> If you squint at this really hard and ignore 90% of it, this is a Giver AU. But mostly I just took the parts of The Giver I wanted and ran away, cackling. No need to have read the book. :D A million thanks to Celly1995 for the beta!
> 
> Takes place in the 2014-2015 season. I actually followed the schedule. Woo!
> 
> Warning for a minor offscreen original-character death.
> 
> I'm a-[tumblin'](https://linskywords.tumblr.com/)

Jonny first notices something’s wrong on the ice. They’re playing the Sabres, second game of the regular season, and the team is starting to hit that sweet spot where they’re gelling as a group but aren’t exhausted or injured like they will be later in the season. Jonny’s just gotten the puck and is racing towards the goal, looking for an opening, when he’s hit from behind by Stamford.

Getting hit is rare. Hockey is already a physically aggressive game; no one wants to give the pundits more to talk about by looking emotionally unbalanced on top of that. The few times Jonny’s been hit, it’s been by someone like Stamford—someone who doesn’t have the skill to get attention from the media any other way. Jonny usually just shakes it off and focuses on more important things.

This time, though, he gets mad.

The anger is instant, and it’s so strong that he’s blindsided by it. That’s what saves him, maybe: he’s so mad he shocks himself into stillness, can’t even get it together enough to think about acting on it. Then the whistle blows, the ref calling a penalty, and Jonny realizes his stick is on the ice and his gloves are hanging from his fingertips like he’s about to throw them off.

“You okay?” Seabs asks, skating over.

Jonny pulls his gloves back on and breathes deep. The anger is still there, burning in his gut, foreign and strange. “Uh, yeah,” he says.

“Can’t believe that guy, hitting you like that,” Seabs says. “What does he think this is, the seventies?”

“Well, you know Stamford,” Jonny says, voice less steady than he’d like it to be.

Seabs either doesn’t notice, or he attributes it to the hit. Jonny follows him back to the bench, trying to shake off the continued urge to draw back his fist and smash it somewhere it doesn’t belong, like Stamford’s face.

***

They win six to two. Jonny’s not thinking about the hit by the end of the game, too distracted by the play, but the beat reporters remind him. “Jonathan,” one of them calls to him in the scrum afterward. “That was a tough hit you took from Stamford out there. How would you respond to critics who call him uncivilized on the ice?”

Jonny blinks a little at the word. It’s a big one to throw around casually like that. But the memory of the hit comes back to him, along with the echo of those burning embers in his gut. “Uh, I’d say that’s a pretty harsh term to give him,” he says. Even if he might agree with it. “We’re all out there, you know, just trying to do our best, and maybe I don’t agree with every choice Stamford makes out there, but I’d never want to give him a label like that.”

“So you don’t condone impulsive violence on the ice,” someone says.

Jonny doesn’t know why they bother asking him things like this. “No, definitely not,” he says. “We have a lot of kids watching us, and I would never want them to think it’s okay to display ungoverned emotions.”

The reporter nods seriously, like Jonny’s said anything other than the obvious.

Patrick follows him home that night, like he does a lot: neither of them has put in for a partner yet, and it’s nice to have company after a game. Jonny’s not really worried about what happened on the ice; it was just a weird pain thing, or whatever. But just in case, he swings by the bathroom to check his pill holder when Patrick heads to the kitchen to reheat some pasta.

The compartment for Saturday is empty. He thought it would be.

“I can’t believe you have that thing,” Patrick says from the doorway. “You can’t remember to do the thing you’ve been doing every day since you were ten?”

“Some of us like to be responsible about it,” Jonny says, like he does every time Patrick makes fun of his pill holder. Patrick takes his straight from the bottle every morning when his phone alarm goes off, but it bothers Jonny, not being able to check.

He takes a last look at his pill holder before he leaves the bathroom. Definitely empty.

He’s not gonna worry about it, he decides while they eat their pasta and watch the _Wheel of Fortune_ reruns Patrick’s inexplicably recorded on his DVR. It was just a weird random thing. No need to let it ruffle his zen.

***

He’s basically forgotten about it by the next morning. He goes to practice and works out and gets lunch with some of the guys, and then he goes home and Skypes with David, who’s been trying to apply for a kid ever since he and Christine hit three years of partnership last June. Jonny just saw him last week when the Hawks were in Winnipeg, but there’s always more to talk about with the child application process.

“It’s just such a pain,” David says. “Turns out the letters of recommendation are five each, not five per couple—who needs that many? And Christine had to ask her boss, basically, or she’d have been pissed off with her, but the woman is incredibly slow. She was supposed to turn it in last week and we think she still hasn’t done it.”

“Oh man,” Jonny says. “Are you guys gonna get penalized for that?”

“I don’t know, maybe?” David says. “I think it’ll just slow the process down.”

“But it’s already been so long for you guys,” Jonny says. He always thought couples got approved pretty quickly. The ones who were got approved at all, anyway.

“Yeah,” David says. “Our home consultation person did tell us we were nearing the end of the window for completing the process without having to start over, so—dude, what’s going on?”

Jonny blinks at him. He doesn’t know why David stopped, except—oh, huh. His lip hurts, like maybe he was biting it, and the muscles between his eyebrows are weirdly sore. He consciously relaxes them. “Um, sorry, nothing,” he says. “I just, um—is the window gonna close on you guys?”

David laughs. “I hope not. I do not want to start this process all over again.”

There’s a little jerking feeling in Jonny’s chest when he thinks about that. “Would that—if you start over, doesn’t that count as a strike against you in the process?”

“Well, yeah,” David says, like it’s obvious. “But you know how the system works. If we’re in a position to be good parents, it means we’ll get a kid. They don’t make mistakes with this stuff.”

“Right,” Jonny says. He does know that. It’s just that when he thinks about something going wrong, and David and Christine not being able to get the family they want, it makes something in his chest go crazy. It’s almost like he’s feeling—

“No, really, is something going on?” David says. “Your face is…I don’t even know.”

“Uh, yeah, I think I ate something weird,” Jonny says. “I should probably go. But good luck to you guys, okay?”

“Thanks,” David says, unconcerned, and Jonny hangs up the call and bows his head and breathes deep.

It’s just a little flare of anxiety. Anxiety breaks through everyone’s zen sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything.

***

He’s fine the rest of the night, calm as anything, and then he’s driving Patrick to skate the next morning when the minivan pulls out in front of them without warning.

“So then I told Jackie she’d have to—fuck!” Patrick shouts, and Jonny slams on the brakes, the car skidding, metal shrieking and glass shattering as they collide.

“Oh my God,” Patrick says as they come to a stop. “Are you okay?”

Jonny’s heart is going a million miles per hour. He’s hunched over the steering wheel, clenching it in his hands, breathing hard. He can’t even think above the roar of shock in his head.

“Jonny,” Patrick says. “Are you okay?”

Jonny raises his head and looks at Patrick, who’s speaking and all in one piece and must be fine. He’s sure his eyes are wide and crazed-looking, but he can’t do anything about that. “Yeah,” he says, and he sees Patrick’s shoulders relax a little.

Jonny’s the captain. His zen has always been better than Patrick’s—than most people’s. He should be able to deal with this. But he’s not sure he can even unclench his hands from the wheel.

“We should…” Patrick says, gesturing at the car in front of them.

“Right.” Jonny can do this.

He pries his hands away from the wheel. They’re shaking, and he fumbles with the door handle, hoping Patrick can’t see.

 _Pull yourself together,_ he thinks to himself, as he staggers towards the other car. He can’t be like this when he faces the other driver. Can’t be uncivilized.

The other driver is a blond woman in her thirties or forties, hair askew and a tiny cut at her temple bleeding. “I’m so sorry,” she says calmly when Jonny reaches her. “I must not have been looking when I pulled out.”

 _Fucking right you weren’t,_ are the first words in Jonny’s head. “Uh, yeah, it’s okay,” he says. Because it is. Because no stranger deserves to be yelled at for an obvious accident. Jonny doesn’t even know why he’s shaking like this. “Should we exchange insurance information?”

They do, while they walk around the cars, and Jonny’s doing okay, giving her his info in a calm voice, until they reach the place where his front bumper is noticeably more crumpled on the passenger side than the driver’s, and Jonny has to stop and swallow against the rage that comes welling up.

 _Look what you almost did to Patrick,_ he thinks, wants to shout so badly it scares him. The minivan is angled so that the passenger side of his car got the brunt of the damage, and the woman is inspecting it calmly, like this is just business. If Jonny has been going faster—if he hadn’t braked so quickly—

“Hey, the cops are getting here,” Patrick says, and Jonny blinks and looks away from the woman. He has to fight the embarrassing urge to run his hands over Patrick’s body, make sure no damage was done. His heart is loud in his ears. “Want me to talk to them?”

“No, you should, um, you should get an Uber to skate,” Jonny says. “I’ll stay here and deal with this.”

Patrick looks skeptical, but Jonny talks him into it. Then he deals with the cops. When they’re done, he leaves the car for a tow company, takes his bags a little ways down the road, collapses on a bench with his head in his hands, and shakes.

Fuck. He’s never felt like this. His whole body feels jittery, like it wants to be up and running or fighting or breaking things down, and his lungs are working double time to suck in air. He plays professional hockey, puts his body through the ringer every day, and he’s never felt like this.

No—he has felt like this. Just not for a long time.

Not since he was a little kid trying to fall asleep in his bedroom, terrified of the shadows that lurked in the corners and the house fires they learned about on fire safety day and burglars who might have guns. He remembers this crashing, physical sensation of fear. His mom used to come and sit with him and tell him that it would be okay, that none of it would happen, and that someday he wouldn’t even have to worry about it. Someday he’d take pills, too, like she and Dad did, and he’d never have to feel anxious or afraid like this again.

And now he does.

Jonny’s never had a problem with his pills before. He’s always been exceptionally balanced, only needing slight increases in his dosage as he grew. There’s a reason his teammates call him Captain Zen. But one of his friends at Shattuck, Brian, had his pills start malfunctioning, and he flipped out in the locker room one day, yelling at all of them for not caring enough about losing. The doctors had to try him on a bunch of different brands before they found a new one that worked, and some of the ones they tried made Brian so sick that he couldn’t even get out of bed. He didn’t play for six months.

Jonny can’t do that. Not in October, at the beginning of the season. Not when professional hockey is already so scrutinized for signs of uncivilized behavior. He’d lose everything.

If there’s something going on—if this isn’t just a few blips of weirdness—he has to make sure no one finds out.

***

Jonny keeps his head down in the locker room when he shows up for the game that night. He didn’t sleep very much during his nap—too many thoughts in his head, too much of what felt like electric charges running down his limbs—but he throws himself into the game, trying not to let everything he’s feeling distract him from hockey.

They lose in overtime.

Jonny’s lost so many hockey games before. Six years in the NHL, two years at UND, all the years before that—it’s got to be in the high hundreds. But this one punches him in the chest. That last goal goes into their net, and it feels worse than any game he’s ever lost before.

He ends up on a bench in the locker room, dodging the media that’s supposed to be his responsibility. He just can’t imagine doing it: can’t imagine standing over there next to Sharpy, smoothing his face out and pretending not to care.

They were so close to winning, and they lost. Jonny keeps seeing it: that final goal sliding in, Crow not being in quite the right place to stop it. The Flames smiling and Jonny wanting to sit down on the ice and cry.

He’s done this so many times before. So many. But he can’t remember how.

“We going back to yours?” Patrick asks, sidling up to him.

 _No,_ Jonny thinks, and he opens his mouth to say it, but what comes out is, “Sure.” Anything not to be alone with this feeling.

***

Patrick doesn’t seem to notice anything’s wrong. He chatters in the car, stuff about his sisters, and doesn’t complain about Jonny being quiet until they’re halfway through their post-game meal.

“Come on, pull your weight,” Patrick says, kicking him under the table. “I can’t keep up this whole conversation by myself, you know.”

“Sorry,” Jonny says. “I’m just really wiped. Couldn’t really nap this afternoon,” he adds, and immediately regrets it—poor sleep is one of the warning signs that your equilibrium might be slipping, according to the list he looked up this afternoon.

But Patrick doesn’t seem suspicious. “Do you need better blackout curtains? Because mine are the best.”

Jonny rolls his eyes. “Yes, we all know about the wonder of your blackout curtains.”

“Seriously, though, if you aren’t sleeping—”

“I’ll be fine,” Jonny says. He isn’t even tired, really. But when they go over to the couch, Patrick flipping through Netflix movies and monologuing about their pluses and minuses, Jonny finds that he is—tired enough to slump against the cushions and be relieved when Patrick sits close enough for their shoulders to brush.

The two of them touch a lot, even more than Jonny touches the rest of the team, which is already a high bar. Frequent touch is important for physical health and peak performance as an athlete. But it feels like even more than that to Jonny at the moment. Like Patrick’s touch is actually making him feel better, like every second they spend pressed together like this loosens the knot around his chest. Jonny closes his eyes and absorbs as much of it as he can.

***

He’s anxious before their next game. He hasn’t been anxious for a game like this since he was a tiny kid in pads that were almost slipping off of him. But losing was so awful, and Jonny doesn’t want to feel like that again—because it sucked, but also because of what it means for his equilibrium. He’s so guarded against the bad feelings that when they win, when his goal is the one that clinches it for them in overtime, he’s so surprised that he shouts for joy and throws his hands in the air.

He’s horribly embarrassed a second later. That was basically the definition of uncivilized. Fortunately, the dramatic win excuses it a little, and people mostly seem amused.

“Who’d’ve thought it, Captain Zen letting loose a little,” Sharpy says in the locker room.

“Yeah, well.” Jonny’s face has been hot ever since he realized what he did. He hopes everyone mistakes it for exertion.

He still feels the rush, though, as he surveys the room, even as he babbles excuses to reporters about thinking that his team would benefit from a moment of celebration. The hot pulse of pride that his team did so well. He’s been proud of the team so many times over the years, but he’s never felt it like this.

He feels the same thing after their next game, when they beat the Flyers four-nothing. This time Jonny manages to refrain from jumping and cheering, but afterward he watches Patrick talk to the press about the two goals he scored, and he thinks, _he’s beautiful._ It’s silly, because Patrick is patently not beautiful right now, sweaty and red-faced with the helmet line across his forehead, and beauty is an outdated concept anyway. But there’s something about his face right now: a glow, almost, as if the beauty of his hockey is shining through, and Jonny can’t look away.

Patrick gets done with the press and comes over to change, and Jonny blurts out, “Those goals were amazing.”

Patrick stops and quirks his brows and then smiles. “Thanks, Captain, I try.”

“No, I mean…” Jonny tries to come up with words that will get across how it felt to watch that second goal go in, the easy control of Patrick leaning in to shoot, the miracle of the puck flying in where it shouldn’t have been possible.

It’s probably best that he can’t find any words. He’s supposed to be hiding this, after all. Gushing at Patrick in the locker room is definitely the opposite of hiding it.

“You did good,” is all he says, finally, clapping Patrick on the back.

Patrick smiles at him, and Jonny bites back words he can’t even find.

***

Jonny would never have expected a win to be harder to deal with than a loss. But the loss just made him quiet; the wins keep making him want to say things, and that’s more of a challenge.

The team goes out after the Flyers game. Jonny ends up wedged between Patrick and Seabs in a booth, his favorite kind of soda in front of him, and he keeps his mouth on the straw to keep from saying anything dumb.

They mostly talk about the game, until Sharpy changes the subject. “Did you hear about the protests at Minnesota State today?”

“What, the naturalist stuff?” Seabs asks, and Jonny’s not really listening. He keeps getting distracted by Patrick’s hands, for some reason. Patrick’s fiddling with his napkin, and something about the way his fingers keep creasing the cloth draws Jonny’s eyes back and back again.

“Oh yeah,” Duncs says. “They were talking about it on the news. Apparently they had people kissing.”

The word makes Jonny look up. He didn’t think people these days ever…not for real. “Seriously?”

Sharpy cocks an eyebrow. “Interested in that one, baby captain?”

Jonny feels his face heat. There’s no reason for it. He’s not interested in—never has been. But his heart is beating faster anyway.

He opens his mouth, tries to come up with something to say to deflect it, but Patrick speaks up before he can. “Yeah,” Patrick drawls, “Captain Zen over here is a secret naturalist. Goes to secret midnight parties for kissing orgies.”

Everyone laughs. Jonny’s face is still hot, but his body relaxes.

“Kissing,” Bicks says, disgust in his voice. “I don’t know how they think they’re going to win anyone to their cause with shit like that.”

“They don’t think,” Sharpy says. “Too much emotion in their systems for them to think clearly.”

“Fucking Neanderthals,” Seabs says, and someone offers to get more food, and that seems to be the end of that topic.

Adrenaline is still sparking through Jonny’s system. He wants to thank Patrick for rescuing him, but he doesn’t know how to do it without making it obvious that he needed rescuing.

He looks over at Patrick and finds Patrick looking back at him, mischief in his eyes. A zing goes through Jonny’s stomach.

“Getting near midnight,” Patrick says, nudging him. “Don’t you have an orgy to go to?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Jonny says, but he has to look away, because his cheeks are getting hot again. He catches just the tiniest glimpse of Patrick’s mouth before he does, his lips shiny and red where Patrick’s tongue is darting out to wet them.

Jonny’s stomach does a slow roll. He shouldn’t probably stop drinking his soda so fast.

***

When he wakes up the next morning, his cock is hard.

His cock is hard lots of mornings. It’s a circulation thing: he remembers learning about it in school, and being told that it wasn’t something they should feel bad about. Jonny never really understood why they would feel bad about it. It’s just one of the things he sometimes has to put up with in the morning, like having crusty things in the corners of his eyes and yawning a lot before he drinks his coffee. But it feels weird this time. Almost…urgent.

He thinks maybe he was dreaming about something. There are wisps of an image dissolving in his mind, something warm and dark and thrilling that’s making him sweat under his sheet. There’s a burning feeling in his belly, and it travels down and concentrates itself in his cock.

He has his hand on it before he realizes what’s happening. Then he freezes, the hot starburst of pleasure still tingling through him. He was going to…he started to…

He’s too warm. He needs to be colder. He gets out of bed and lurches into the bathroom and turns the shower as cold as it will go. Then he peels off his briefs—a delicate operation, because every brush of the fabric creates a little echo of that shattering feeling. There’s something sticky at the head of his cock, and what is happening to him?

The cold water when it hits his body is a welcome change. Jonny stands under it and lets it wash all the over-warm feelings out of him. His cock slowly goes limp and shrinks back to its normal state, and Jonny’s relief is so strong he drops his head and closes his eyes under the spray.

He could probably get out of the shower at this point, but he doesn’t. He stays under for another twenty minutes, letting the cold water pummel him until he’s numb to it, until he’s positive those hot bursts of feeling aren’t coming back.

***

The team is flying to Nashville that morning. Jonny has to hurry when he finally gets out of the shower, racing to pull warm clothes over his chilled skin, and he’s still shivering when he gets to the gate.

“What did you do, find a snowbank to stand in?” Sharpy asks when Jonny gives a not-so-subtle shiver next to him.

“AC is broken in my car,” Jonny says.

“Sucks,” Sharpy says, and Jonny’s hit with the urge to ask: has Sharpy ever had anything like this happen to him? But of course he hasn’t. Sharpy’s pills aren’t malfunctioning.

Jonny sits down next to Patrick on the plane a little while later. “Oh no,” Patrick says. “You’re going to get your chill all over me, aren’t you?”

“I’m much better now,” Jonny says. It’s true: most of the chill has seeped out of his body by this point. But he’s still a little cold, and Patrick’s shoulder is right there—

“Oh, go on,” Patrick says with a heavy sigh, and Jonny leans over and rests his head on Patrick’s shoulder and presses their arms together while they watch game tape on Patrick’s iPad.

It does make him a little warmer, but it’s also distracting in ways he didn’t expect. Patrick’s holding the iPad so they can both see, and he’s rubbing one finger unconsciously against the edge of it: up and down, up and down, and Jonny can’t help but watch the way he did in the bar. It’s making him feel funny, like tingles are racing all over his skin.

“Shit, we can do better in the neutral zone than that,” Patrick says, and Jonny hasn’t even been watching enough to know what he’s talking about. He makes a vague noise of agreement, but it must not be convincing enough, because Patrick says, “What, you’re not yelling at me about how we can be better? Are you feeling all right?”

“I don’t yell,” Jonny says. He doesn’t. Yelling is for the uncivilized.

“Sure,” Patrick says fondly. He tips his head to the side so that his ear brushes the top of Jonny’s head, and heat shimmers down Jonny’s body, coming to rest in his belly. Like…like the feeling he had when he woke up this morning, deep and low and thrilling.

Shit.

“I think I’m gonna take a nap,” he says, and Patrick hums agreeably.

Jonny thinks about taking his head off Patrick’s shoulder to sleep—it would be the smart thing to do—but he doesn’t.

***

Patrick makes himself scarce when they get to the hotel that afternoon after practice. He always does this when they travel: likes to have some space to think without the team around him all the time, he says. He’s off exploring some historical district or something; Jonny wasn’t really paying attention. He’s just relieved to have the room to himself so that he doesn’t have to worry about hiding any of the weird feelings that keep trying to take over his body.

His first mistake is trying to nap. He lies down and closes his eyes, and then all he can see is Patrick’s finger, running lightly back and forth along the edge of the iPad. It’s so easy to imagine that finger somewhere else: on Jonny’s skin, maybe. Patrick’s given him back massages before, stroked his hair sometimes when they were lying around together, but the thought of his hands moving over Jonny’s bare skin is fascinating now in a way it never has been before. Jonny can feel parts of his body taking interest as he lies there with his eyes closed—his groin, his belly, definitely, but also weirder places, like the hair on his arms standing up, and his nipples hardening like they’re cold. He thinks about Patrick’s fingers brushing over those hard peaks, and his breath comes short like he’s doing something way more rigorous than lying there thinking. Then he pictures Patrick’s mouth from last night, the shine of spit on his lips, the way his tongue darted out to lick them again, and he—

Fuck, this is not happening. Not if Jonny can help it. He gets out of bed and goes to find the hotel gym.

***

He manages to avoid seeing much of Patrick over the next day. Mostly by looking down whenever Patrick’s in the room. He’s pretty sure Patrick thinks Jonny’s annoyed with him about something, but that’s so much better than Patrick suspecting any of the thoughts Jonny’s actually having about him. Hell, Jonny would hide them from himself if he could.

The game that night sucks. The Preds trounce them two-three, and Jonny can’t score to save his life. He remembers this feeling from their shoot-out loss a few games ago, but he doesn’t remember it feeling quite as shitty as it does now.

“What do you think, restaurant or room service?” Patrick calls over to him as they’re both showering after the game.

“I don’t care,” Jonny says, more angrily than he’d like.

“What?” Patrick pokes his head around the corner of the shower barrier, grinning. “You don’t have an opinion about food? You?”

Jonny’s going to make a comeback, but—Patrick still has soap in his hair, which looks ridiculous, and his chest is bare and wet and wow, has he always had pecs like that? Jonny finds himself tracking a water droplet that’s sliding across a nipple. “I don’t always have opinions about food,” he manages to say.

“Right, like that time you made me eat sushi with you for a solid month, that was you not having opinions about food.” Patrick’s smirking, soap suds in a dimple, and oh fuck, Jonny can feel his cock start to thicken. This is not okay. His cheeks are already reddening, thinking about it, and his stomach does a sick swoop. If Patrick notices—

Fortunately, Patrick chooses that moment to go back to his own shower. Jonny rinses off mechanically, not touching anywhere near his cock. It seems to help if he thinks about boring things, so he tries to figure out what he needs to tell his accountant on their next phone call, and by the time he wraps a towel around his waist he’s still panicky but soft.

Is this going to keep happening? How did anyone survive, pre-pills, if every day, every few hours, they were swamped by…

Not the time to think about it. Not while he’s changing in front of the team. Maybe never.

He’s okay the rest of the evening, ordering room service with Patrick, and he falls asleep to normal thoughts about his workout plans for the next few days. But when he wakes up in the morning, he’s sweating and hard again.

He clenches his hands into fists by his sides and tries to remember the things he thought about yesterday to distract himself. His finances—his workout plans—anything that isn’t the memory of Patrick’s pecs outlined in water, the smooth muscle of his shoulders leading up to the long lines of his neck—

His cock throbs, and he gasps like he’s been punched. He’s supposed to be better than this. He’s failing.

Patrick’s still asleep across the room. Jonny gets up and goes quietly into the bathroom.

He can’t take a cold shower like last time—can’t risk his health like that. That’s what he tells himself when he sets the water to warm. But then he’s standing under it, the stream of hot water making his cock tingle, and he thinks he was probably lying.

He remembers a book they discussed in English class: a controversial pre-reform novel, where the main characters engaged in sexual activity that the teacher had to explain to a class of confused seventeen-year-olds. Why would they want to do something like that, everyone had wanted to know, and Ms. Burnoise explained to them that people used to have what was called a sex drive. They were driven to do things like that—pressing their bodies up against someone else’s—and that was one reason they had the pills now. So no one would be driven like that anyone. Jonny remembers thinking how crazy it must have been, this drive beyond your control to do senseless things, and being grateful for the pills that saved them from it.

Now, with the water running over his reddened cock, it doesn’t seem that senseless or insane. His cock is aching for something, and the idea of having a body to press it against sends a wave of sensation over Jonny’s body. Pleasure, white-hot in his stomach and groin.

He shouldn’t touch himself. He shouldn’t give in to this feeling that’s trying to tyrannize his body. But he wants to anyway.

The first touch of a fingertip to his cock makes him suck in air. It’s like he has so many more nerves there than he ever thought possible, and they make his brain blank out. He runs his finger over the head, breathing hard at the thrills that shoot through his body, and before he can think about it he has his whole hand wrapped around his shaft.

The tightness is…it’s even better. Jonny lets out a groan before he can stop himself, and then he has to bite his lip hard to keep any more sound from escaping. He starts to move his hand, without even thinking about it: sliding it up and down his cock, fingers squeezing tight. The water makes his hand glide smoothly over the sensitized skin, and all he can think about is that word again: _pleasure._

It’s doing strange things to the rest of his body—things he’d probably be worried about, if he weren’t so focused on the feeling in his cock. His heart is beating like crazy, and his knees are acting funny, like they don’t want to hold him up anymore. He braces himself on the shower wall with one hand and speeds the other one up. It’s hard to get enough air, and he hangs his head down, gasping as the water pours down around him.

There’s slickness coming out of the end of his cock now. It should be gross, but all Jonny feels is a jolt of heightened excitement. He rubs the liquid over the length of his cock. It doesn’t last long under the spray, but more is coming out, hot and slippery and making him swallow and squeeze tighter. His hips are pistoning now, his breath harsh in his ears, and the distant thought comes to him that if this keeps building, it will kill him—he won’t live to see how much better it would feel if he were rubbing his cock up against someone else—against Patrick, against his strong, muscled body—

Something bursts within him and he lets out a cry, hips jerking involuntarily. Something’s shooting out of his cock, something thick and white that paints the wall of the shower, and the pleasure is crashing over him now. It crowds out everything, nothing in his head but brain-melting pleasure.

He’s panting. His heart is pounding against his ribs. Slowly he straightens up, feeling his cock start to soften in his hand.

Fuck. What did he just do?

He doesn’t seem to be hurt. But there’s a strange weakness in his limbs, a wobbliness in his muscles, and a hot glow in the pit of his stomach. He might hurt himself badly, if he tried to do anything strenuous right now. And the white stuff on the wall—ejaculate, he remembers dimly from a biology class in high school. He made that. It shot out of him, while he was touching himself, like a barbarian with no control over his own body.

Jonny squeezes his eyes shut under the spray. Okay, well, he did that. He never has to do it again. He can forget it ever happened.

He splashes water on the white stuff on the shower wall to make it wash down the drain. Then he washes the rest of himself quickly, making sure to stay away from his cock.

Patrick’s just waking up when Jonny comes back into the room. His eyes are heavy-lidded with sleep, blinking open at Jonny’s footsteps. Jonny looks away quickly.

***

The strange heat takes a while to fade from his stomach. It’s still there when they get on the plane for St. Louis. It’s not a driving heat, like it was before: just a lingering one, like his body doesn’t want him to forget what he did. Jonny presses his lips together and focuses on anything but Patrick’s body in the seat next to him.

Patrick goes out somewhere again when they reach St. Louis. Jonny goes to the pool and swims until he’s tired enough to fall right to sleep that night.

***

“Are you avoiding me?” Patrick asks three days later, when they’ve been back in Chicago for a day and have already beaten the Senators.

Jonny jerks guiltily. “No,” he says. “Why would I be?”

He has been. It seems like the safest way to keep the thing from happening, the thing that makes him flush from head to toe and not be able to focus on conversation. Jonny hasn’t woken up hard since the day of the disastrous shower incident, so it must be working.

“I don’t know, finally admitting my company makes you feel inferior?” Patrick says. It’s a joke, but Jonny can see that the conversation isn’t: that Patrick’s hurt in a way he’s trying to hide, hurt that Jonny wouldn’t want to be around him.

He can’t really be hurt. He doesn’t feel things like that. Jonny’s just projecting what—what he himself would feel, if Patrick decided he didn’t want to be around him right now. How much that would suck.

He wraps an arm around Patrick’s shoulders and pull him close. “Yeah, I just can’t bear to be near such intimidating greatness,” he drawls.

“You got that right,” Patrick says, but he relaxes against Jonny’s side. The top of his head comes to the middle of Jonny’s face, and Jonny ends up with a nose full of curls. He doesn’t mean to inhale, but he does, and the smell of Patrick washes over him, leaving heat prickles and excitement in its wake.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

The season’s six months long. He can make it that long. In the off-season—he’ll tell someone. He’ll fix this.

***

He goes online that night and googles “how to keep your equilibrium.”

He thinks, as he types it in, that he might be able to accomplish the same thing by asking Patrick. He knows Patrick’s had to do some work to boost his equilibrium over the years. Patrick’s naturally excitable, and it got him in trouble with the press his first couple years as a Hawk. The two of them have never talked about it—Jonny didn’t want to rub Patrick’s face in how easy it’s always been for Jonny to keep his zen—but he knows Patrick’s put some serious effort into leveling out. If anyone could give Jonny advice on how to do it, it would be him.

But Patrick’s never had to deal with pure, unfiltered emotions before. And the very idea of bringing this up to Patrick makes Jonny’s body go tight with shame and fear.

There are a lot of google results. He figured there would be; not everyone finds it as easy as Jonny always did while on the pills. The most legit site of the batch has an audio series of guided meditations for putting untoward emotions out of his mind. Jonny’s skeptical of the whole thing—is breathing deeply really going to help that much?—but he needs to try something.

Jonny puts his earbuds in, closes his eyes, and tries to empty his mind of everything involving Patrick.

***

He adds the meditation to his morning and evening routines. Maybe it helps, because it takes five days before Jonny does anything else dumb. In that time, they fly to two different cities; they lose twice and win once; and Jonny turns down four separate meal invitations from teammates.

“Fine, be weird and antisocial,” Shawzy says when Jonny turns down his and Saader’s dinner invitation in Toronto. He sounds like he’s joking, but Jonny panics a little. He’s tempted to take it back, just so Shawzy doesn’t think he’s being weird, but he doesn’t trust himself around other people right now. He’s never sure if he’s reacting to things the right way.

He can’t avoid Patrick, though. Patrick’s always out and about a lot while they travel, but that still leaves him with plenty of time in the room, and now that Jonny doesn’t have the refuge of looking down every time Patrick’s there, he finds himself irresistibly drawn. He just—wants to look at Patrick, and listen to him talk, and sit as near to him as possible.

Breathing deeply doesn’t seem to help that much.

They fly back to Chicago the night they lose to the Isles, and Jonny wakes up late the next morning, hand already on his cock.

He should take it off, take a deep breath, back away from this. But he’s already crossed the line where everything feels too good to stop. He’ll stop—after. Just as soon as he gets to feel this. Then he’ll stop.

It kind of hurts, his hand rubbing over his bare cock without the water to slick things up, but he thinks about Patrick laughing and jostling him on the plane last night, and he doesn’t care. He thinks about Patrick’s bare chest as he lounged around the room, and Patrick’s ass before he slid sweatpants up over it, and then Jonny’s gasping into his pillow and exploding into his hand.

His cock aches a little from the chafing. He deserves it.

He knows what this is; he’s not an idiot. He knows that people in some parts of the world still have sex: uncivilized areas, like Australia and Latin America. He’s heard cautionary tales about how people in those countries still give themselves over to ungovernable energies, and it saps them of the ability to be useful and productive. Jonny just never thought he’d fall victim to it. He needs to stop before he does himself permanent damage.

It’s a question of mind over matter. Maybe it’s easier with the pills, but Jonny’s always been better at controlling his emotions than everyone else. He just has to try harder.

He doesn’t do a great job later when he goes into the locker room and sees Patrick. “Hey,” Patrick says, turning his face up to Jonny’s with a grin that makes Jonny’s stomach lurch. “You coming to Sharpy’s thing tomorrow?”

He has really long eyelashes. No—Jonny is not looking at his eyelashes. “Uh, what thing?”

“You know,” Patrick says, impatient. “His bad decisions movie night.”

“His what?”

Patrick laughs. “Were you not there? Sharpy wants to watch a pre-reform movie and make fun of the characters for their dumb decisions.”

Jonny gets a little bump of adrenaline at the idea of it. “Oh, wow, no, I think I missed that,” he says.

“Well, now you know,” Patrick says. “So, you’ll be there?”

“Um,” Jonny says. He needs to come up with a good excuse, but fuck, have Patrick’s eyes always been that blue? He can’t think when they’re aimed at him like that. “I, uh…”

“Toes.” Sharpy’s elbow digs into his side. “You’re coming, right?”

“I can’t,” Jonny blurts out.

Sharpy wrinkles his nose. “Seriously? You’ve been totally MIA lately.” Then he slides into a smirk. “What are you hiding? I mean, I thought Peeks was joking about the midnight kissing orgies, but…”

“Fuck you,” Jonny says. His heart is racing. He can’t let anyone think he’s keeping secrets, not if it’s going to make them look more closely. “Fine, I’ll be there.”

“Success!” Sharpy says, and Patrick’s beaming at him, and what did Jonny just agree to?

***

Turns out he agreed to the worst idea ever. It doesn’t really hit home until he’s sitting in Sharpy’s media room, squashed next to Patrick, watching Gary Cooper gaze longingly at Grace Kelly while all his teammates boo, and then he realizes how dumb this was.

Jonny hasn’t seen a lot of movies like this. Maybe one or two, with his parents, while they explained to him some of the outdated ideas. He doesn’t need any explanation here, though: it seems obvious to him what Gary Cooper’s feeling when he looks at Grace Kelly. Obvious why he wouldn’t want to leave the country while she’s in it.

“Oh man, what an idiot,” Shawzy says. “The mafia are looking for you, dude!”

“Yeah, I don’t really get why he’d stay,” Saader says, sounding confused.

 _Because it’s more important for him to be with her,_ Jonny thinks, and then immediately wants to take the thought back. Being with someone is never—it goes against everything he believes in, to prioritize that. But he’s watching Grace plead with him to leave, and his chest feels like it’s full to bursting, and he should never have come to see this movie.

“Okay, but even if you accept that he wants her,” Bicks says. “He’s not going to be able to be with her if he’s dead.”

“Maybe he thinks he’ll be able to protect her somehow?” Patrick suggests from next to Jonny. His shoulder rub against Jonny’s arm when he leans over to talk.

“Nah, he’s just being feelings-blind,” Sharpy says. “He’s not thinking anything.”

On-screen, Gary Cooper pawns the ticket that was supposed to get him out of there and uses the money to buy a gun to sneak into the mafia headquarters.

“Fuck, this is ridiculous,” Seabs says, startling Jonny when he was absorbed in watching Gary Cooper try to talk his way out of the chair he’s tied to. “This guy doesn’t deserve to live.”

Jonny bites down on his lip. He knows it’s true. Everything Gary Cooper’s doing is dumb. It’s not even worth it, telling a story about a character like this.

Except…Grace Kelly is on the screen now, sneaking into the mafia headquarters in disguise, and Gary Cooper’s face when he sees her—it’s not an emotion anyone _should_ have, sure, but Jonny can’t look away. He can see why you might do dumb things for an emotion like that. He’s looking at her like she’s everything, like she’s worth more than the whole rest of the world put together, like she’s…

“Oh, I get it,” Shawzy says. “He’s just doing this because he wants to have sex with her.”

“No, he’s not,” Jonny says, before he can think about it.

It’s a little too abrupt—he can feel it in the way the room turns its attention to him. Fuck.

“He’s not?” Sharpy says, already grinning, like this is going to be good. “Why’s he doing it, then, Toes?”

A word comes to Jonny’s mind. But it’s an antiquated word—not one he can say out loud. Not one he even believes in. But he hears it echoing in the back of his mind at the look on Gary Cooper’s face.

“He’s not doing it for any reason at all,” Jonny says. “Like Sharpy said. He’s just stumbling blind.”

“I don’t know if that’s quite true,” Seabs says slowly. “Like, he must want something, right?”

Jonny knows what he wants. He’s watching Gary and Grace work together to break free, watching Grace be sneaky and breathtaking and brilliant. Even if Jonny doesn’t fully understand it, even if he doesn’t agree with it, he knows what Gary wants.

Next to him, Patrick sighs and snuggles his head against Jonny’s shoulder. “Too sleepy for this movie,” he says, under the noise of the other conversation, and Jonny looks down at his curly head, at the curve of his jaw, feels his soft breath brushing against Jonny’s neck.

Jonny swallows and looks back at the screen. He knows what Gary Cooper wants.

***

Sharpy’s being loud at the airport the next day. “Toes!” he says when Jonny comes in, leaning over to mess up Jonny’s hair, even though they’re the exact same height. “Good to see you last night, even if you were being a grumpy Gus.”

“I wasn’t being a…” Or was he? He was a little bit in his head after the movie. He was—well, there were a lot of things not to think about. Or to try not to think about.

He spent a long time not thinking about it, last night.

“No worries. At least you were there, unlike some D-men I could mention.” Sharpy raises his voice and directs it towards Duncs, who’s fiddling with his duffel.

Duncs looks up. “Huh?”

“Not into classic movies, Duncs?” Sharpy says.

Duncs’ brows draw together. “That was last night?”

“Uh, yes, as the e-vite said,” Sharpy says.

“Fuck, sorry, man,” Duncs says. “I got really caught up in things. Kelly-Rae and I are splitting up, and there’s been a lot of logistics to take care of.”

“You’re—what?” Jonny says. He must have misheard. There’s no way Duncs really said—

“Yeah, you know, we were going to apply for kids, and when we started filling out the questionnaires it was obvious we weren’t stable enough for it,” Duncs says with a shrug. “We decided we should split up instead and try again with new partners.”

Jonny feels vaguely like he’s been hit between the eyes. “You didn’t—you could have stayed together. You know, without kids.”

Duncs gives him a weird look. “Why would we want to stay together if we weren’t a stable match?”

Sharpy’s saying something to Duncs—something like “That sucks, man, what a hassle”—but Jonny can’t quite hear it. He can’t think beyond what Duncs just told him. The idea of losing someone—someone you see every day, someone who’s the other half of your life—

“You look weird,” Patrick says. “Are you okay?”

He’s standing in front of Jonny. Jonny has ended up sitting in the row of chairs, somehow. He looks up at Patrick, Patrick in the thin sunlight of the airport terminal, rumpled hair and chapped lips and a single line of pillow crease on his cheek. He looks at Patrick and thinks, _I never want to live my life without you._

He’s terrified by how strong the thought is. His stomach feels full, the way it did when he was watching the movie last night. This isn’t the heat that’s made him put his hand on his cock. This is different.

A word comes into his mind again, a word he doesn’t want to think. 

“Jonny?” Patrick says, and yes, Jonny’s been staring too long at him.

“Yeah,” Jonny says. Isn’t quite sure what question he’s answering with it.

Patrick’s lips quirk. “Wow, you are super out of it. Hey, are you sure you aren’t getting sick?”

He brushes his hand over Jonny’s forehead. It makes Jonny shiver, head to toes. He has the urge to reach out and touch: to wrap his arms around his waist and press his nose to the Under Armour in the middle of Patrick’s chest and never let go.

“No,” Jonny says honestly. He’s not sure at all.

***

He expects it to fade. All his other feelings have faded after a couple of hours: the sadness of losing a game, the triumph of winning, the anger of someone bumping into him in a crowd. But they get on the plane and get off in Montreal and go to the hotel and Patrick just walking next to him is enough to charge his body with feeling.

They beat the Habs that night five-zip, and Jonny scores a goal and assists one of Pat’s. The charged feeling goes with him onto the ice, making every moment feel potent and huge. Every time his eyes meet Patrick’s on the bench, every time Patrick aims a word or a grin in his direction, Jonny’s heart beats like crazy and adrenaline zings through his gut.

It’s wonderful and it’s awful. Every moment is an agony of wanting and not having. When Jonny slams into Patrick on the ice after assisting on his goal, he feels like he’ll die of not being able to get closer. He wants to…he wants to climb into Patrick’s skin. He wants to possess him.

By the time the team gets home the next day, Jonny feels physically hungover from being around Patrick so much. His head is pounding and sick. He shuts the door of his condo and locks it behind him and breathes in, deep, and breathes out some tiny fraction of the tension he can feel in his body.

He has no idea how people used to do this all the time.

They don’t have practice that day, and Jonny does a bunch of errands, trying to let the normalcy walk him back from the strain of the last twenty-four hours. It doesn’t quite work, but by the time he Skypes with David that afternoon, he feels able to look at least halfway normal.

David doesn’t seem to notice anything’s wrong, anyway. “Still no progress on the kid thing,” David says, all calm about it, and Jonny wants to say, _Don’t you care? Doesn’t this get to you?_

But it doesn’t, of course. David doesn’t have feelings like this. He doesn’t feel an electric charge go through him at the thought of having a baby with the woman he’s spending his life with. His application will get approved, probably—he’ll get everything he’s ever wanted—and it won’t make any more impression on him than the morning’s weather.

It must be so much easier.

Jonny’s supposed to have Patrick and the not-rookies over for video games tonight, but he cancels. Needs the space to put his head back together. By the time the evening rolls around, though, he’s regretting not having an excuse to see Patrick. It’s been twelve hours, maybe, and that shouldn’t feel like too long, but it does.

He makes it till ten o’clock. Then he picks up the phone and calls.

Patrick answers laughing. “What, did your big plans for the night get canceled?”

Jonny doesn’t even remember what excuse he gave that afternoon. He’s just so relieved to hear Patrick’s voice. “Yeah,” he says. “They just couldn’t compete with the wonder of your company.”

“Well, obviously. I’m fascinating,” Patrick says. “For example, I now know everything there is to know about hair extensions.”

“Oh god,” Jonny says. He can hear the grin in his own voice. “Tell me you don’t have a surprise for us at practice tomorrow.”

“Sadly, the research was not for me,” Patrick says. “Although, now that you mention it, I have thought about making the mullet more dramatic…”

“We’re all doomed,” Jonny says, a giddy bubble rising in his chest, and Patrick laughs, and laughs.

***

It’s all fine. It’s not great, but Jonny’s surviving it. He’s not having a public breakdown or embarrassing himself in front of the media or any of the things that are supposed to happen when you go off the pills. He’s just privately torturing himself with Patrick’s smile and his laugh and the way he sighs when his head is resting on Jonny’s shoulder, and it’s fine. It’s all fine until ten days later, when they’re in Detroit.

They’ve been on a homestand for a week and a half. Jonny’s humiliatingly excited to get back on the road; it’s only a quick trip to Detroit, but still. He’s going to sleep across the room from Patrick again.

His mom calls him after their game. She doesn’t usually call then; she knows he has a lot of press and other duties and needs to get food and sleep, and so she usually just texts him if anything. So when his phone rings, just as Jonny’s heading to the bus for the hotel, he picks up right away.

“Sorry about the game,” she says, in the casual tone that implies he must be disappointed but not all that badly. Jonny’s not sure he’ll ever get used to that disconnect. “I just wanted to call and tell you the approval came through this afternoon. David and Christine are getting a baby.”

Jonny stops walking, all the bad feelings from the loss dropping away in an instant. “They are? That’s wonderful!”

“Well, yes, but of course we expected it,” she says, that faint note of surprise in her voice that means he’s overreacted. Jonny doesn’t even care right now. He’s going to have a little niece or nephew. His brother is having a baby.

His mom goes on for a while about the baby: a girl, apparently, who’s supposed to be born this week to a birth mother in Alberta. “We’ve verified that the mother is healthy, though of course the baby can’t inherit her traits. But I’ve always felt these things affect a child, you know?”

“Sure, Mom,” he says. “I have to go,” he says. There’s a smile still stretching his mouth, and he has to pull himself together before he gets on the team bus.

He needs to pull himself together. He stakes out a row for himself and sits there with his iPad, pretending like he’s going over game stats even though he’s really just sitting there and thinking about meeting David’s baby. 

By the time they get to the hotel, he’s tamped down the need to smile all the time, but he’s still full of energy. He’s silly with Patrick in the elevator, stealing his keycard and pretending he’s not going to give it back.

“What’s with you?” Patrick asks, half laughing. “You’re never like this after a loss.”

“Just a good day,” Jonny says. “Or maybe it’s just that your reflexes are slow, because—”

Patrick tackles him and grabs both keycards and races to the door of their room. Jonny laughs in surprise and gives chase. Patrick opens the door before Jonny gets there, but Jonny’s right behind him and wedges himself in before Patrick can shut it. He twists around and pins Patrick to the inside of the door, and Patrick’s laughing, his body pressed against Jonny’s and his face right there, blue-eyed and breathless and—

Jonny wrenches himself away. He’s breathing hard, and he can’t believe it. Can’t believe what he almost just did.

“Jonny?” Patrick asks uncertainly.

Jonny’s hands are fisted so hard his nails are cutting his palms. “Sorry,” he says, voice hoarse and tight. “Tweaked something during the game.”

“Did you tell the trainers?” Patrick’s coming closer. “Can I—”

“No,” Jonny says, leaping out of range of his hands. “I’m gonna take a shower. I think the hot water will help.” And he makes a break for the bathroom and locks the door behind him.

He spends a moment sagged against the counter just breathing. He can’t—he can’t do things like that. He can’t do things like he almost did. It’s all well and good to try to keep this secret for hockey, but if he outs himself in front of Patrick he won’t just lose hockey; he’ll lose—

Maybe it’s time to think about talking to the trainers.

He takes a very brief shower and then goes straight to bed, Patrick quiet in the bed next to his. As Jonny closes his eyes, he can still feel Patrick’s breath on his mouth and taste the kiss he almost took.

***

He has second thoughts over breakfast the next morning. The shock has worn off, and it’s easier to think that maybe he can keep on being fine—play out the hockey season without interruption, keep the team and the press from ever finding out. But then he remembers the way his body wasn’t his own for a moment there last night, and he thinks about how many moments there’ll be like that in the next six months, and how he’s not sure he can make it through every one without slipping.

He needs—he needs help.

All right. He’ll go. As soon as he’s gotten his palms to stop sweating like this.

His phone buzzes while he waits for the elevator, and he isn’t going to answer, but it’s his mom again. “ _Salut, cheri_ ,” she says. “Did you leave a bottle of pills at our house when you were here last month?”

Jonny already feels sick with the conversation he’s about to have, so there’s not a lot farther to go. He does jump a little, though. “Um, no, I don’t think so,” he says. “I have mine.”

“Really? Because there’s a bottle under your nightstand,” she says.

That…doesn’t make any sense. Jonny has his. “What?”

“It looks new,” his mom says. “It says you filled it, hm, September ninth?”

Jonny’s staring at the elevator doors. It takes him a minute to realize they’ve opened, and he’s supposed to go in. “…What?” he says again, dumbly.

“Yes, it looks like they don’t expire until twenty-seventeen,” she says. “I’ll hold onto it until I see you again, and you can have it as an extra, all right?”

“Yeah,” he says. He’s staring at the blank metal wall of the elevator. “Sure.”

The elevator doors open, on the floor with the trainer’s room on it. Jonny gets off the elevators, stands blankly in the middle of the hallway for a minute, then turns and goes up the stairs.

His pill bottle is buried in the bottom of his medicine kit. He doesn’t need it that often, since he keeps each day’s dose in the pill holder. The bottle is still close to full, and it has the familiar brand name on the front and his name on the prescription information on the back. Underneath that is the expiration date, 9/30/2003.

Jonny sits down heavily on his heels.

He remembers—hadn’t forgotten, just hadn’t thought about it—the way his medicine kit fell out of his bag when he was at home during the preseason. He had to pick up all his stuff from under the night table. He’d grabbed it all, including the pill bottle, and of course they were the right pills; why would he have another bottle of pills around? What would they be doing there? Except that these were issued in 2000, when Jonny was twelve, and—

Yup, there’s the dosage, under the expiration date. 200 mg. The dosage Jonny outgrew fourteen years ago.

His breath is wheezing out of him, and he’s not sure if it’s laughter or something else. Thank fuck Patrick isn’t in the room right now, because this is as close to a breakdown as Jonny’s had since this whole thing started. Now, when it’s almost over.

He focuses on his breathing for a few minutes until it evens out. Then he pulls out his phone and calls the trainer who came with them on this trip. “Hey, Cal, I was just looking for my blockers, and I can’t seem to find them,” he says. “Yeah, Extrodene. Five hundred milligrams. Thanks, you’re the best.”

He hangs up the phone with shaking hands.

***

Cal gives him the pills at the airport. “Better take one now,” he says. “Don’t want you to get messed up by skipping a dose, right?”

“Ha ha,” Jonny says, and swallows down a pill.

He falls asleep with his head tilted against Patrick’s on the flight to Colorado. _When I wake up, it won’t bother me to touch you like this,_ he thinks. He almost feels like he should say goodbye.

***

The next few weeks after Jonny goes back on the pills are normal. They’re amazingly, refreshingly normal.

It’s hard to track exactly when the pills kick in, but the night after they get back they beat the Stars, six-two, and Jonny feels nothing more than the satisfaction of a job well done. One of the goals was his, but he didn’t feel the urge to leap in the air and shot when the puck went in. He feels…calm. Balanced.

His mom calls a couple of days later when he’s packing his bags for the circus trip, to let him know that David and Christine’s baby was born. Jonny congratulates them and looks at the picture they send of themselves with Ella, but he doesn’t get choked up or anything. He’s not sure why he was so over-the-top about her a few days ago. She’s just a baby.

The best part, though, is being able to hang out with Patrick without it being weird. Patrick was such a part of Jonny’s normal before, and then he became decidedly not normal, but now things are back to being comfortable again. Jonny gives Patrick a pair of sneakers as a birthday gift at the airport, and Patrick smiles at him in thanks, but nothing flips over in Jonny’s gut. Jonny’s half waiting for it, trained to expect that heightened feeling in his gut now, but it’s gone.

The team is doing really well: they beat the Flames and have an epic seven-to-one blowout against the Oilers. Jonny scores twice in the Oilers game, and he feels almost like it’s a reward for him finding his equilibrium again. They lose the next night to the Canucks, but that’s okay—it happens. After that the team is off on a winning streak that takes them through Denver, Anaheim, and L.A., and then back home to beat the Blues and the Habs.

It’s in Nashville that things get a little weird. The guys are talking in the locker room before the game about continuing the streak, joking about making each other knock on wood to avoid jinxing it, and Jonny’s grumbling a little about how people aren’t getting ready to go on the ice as fast as they’re supposed to.

“Keep your zen, Cap, it’s fun to be winning,” Sharpy says, and Jonny thinks, _Not as fun as it would have been before._

He’s startled by the thought, in a way he hasn’t been startled by his own thoughts the last couple weeks. It’s not even true, really. It would have been more exciting, to have had a winning streak like this when he was off the pills, but it also would have been terrifying: he would have been working hard to hide his own elation, careful to moderate each word and each gesture. He would have been balancing between two opposite emotional heights. People aren’t meant to live like that.

After they beat Nashville, though, when Jonny’s answering questions about the team’s success for the press, the thought does sneak into his mind: _It would have been fun to know what this felt like, back then._

He pushes the thought away and finishesd the interview. But maybe that’s what starts it—maybe it gets him thinking about the time before, in a way he wasn’t earlier. Either way, that night is the first time he looks at Patrick and feels empty.

“What?” Patrick says, looking up from where he’s sitting on the bed. Jonny realizes he’s hovering near the doorway. Patrick’s haloed in the light of the bedside lamp, damp curls falling around his forehead, and he looks just the way he always does. Jonny doesn’t know what made him falter.

“Sorry,” he says, and goes to put his stuff on the other bed.

***

It’s not a feeling, exactly. It’s maybe even less of a feeling than he’s been having around Patrick since going back on the pills, since mostly every time he’s around Patrick without his stomach going hot and his tongue going thick and awkward he’s felt relieved. The relief is gone now, and things with Patrick are just like they always were, and every time Jonny looks at him he feels like he’s going down a stair and finding empty space where there should be solid ground.

But things are good. They go to New Jersey and Boston, and they keep winning. They have an off-day in Boston that they use to go Christmas shopping on Newbury Street, all the guys helping Jonny pick out the cutest onesies to send to Ella.

Patrick gets really into the onesie search, arguing hard for the alligator print over the ducks. “Though really you’re missing the obvious pattern: little eighty-eights, all over.”

“I’m not trying to scar her,” Jonny says, and Patrick laughs, tongue poking out of his mouth. Jonny feels that weird moment of disconnect again.

They fly to New Jersey the next morning, and Jonny’s putting his suitcase together, folding up the baby clothes so they don’t get mixed up with his socks, when his mom calls to tell him the news.

“David and Christine lost the baby,” she says, and Jonny stops folding.

“Apparently she had a medical defect,” his mom goes on. “They didn’t realize it until they found her this morning.”

Jonny isn’t plunged into ungoverned emotion, the way he might have been a few weeks ago. But he almost feels like he should be, just for a moment, and that in itself is so weird it gives him pause. He shoves it away. “Oh no, that must suck for them,” he says. “They were just getting used to having her around.”

“The good news is that they don’t have to apply again,” his mom says. “Because they were within the first three months of parenthood and weren’t at fault, they get another baby automatically. But there’s a bit of a wait list, so they might not have one by Christmas.”

“What a hassle,” Jonny says, and he has a weird flash of memory. He remembers hearing Sharpy say those words to Duncs, weeks ago—remembers thinking what a horrible reaction it was—

“Yeah, I know they’re sad to lose the momentum they built up, these first couple weeks of parenting,” his mom says.

“Send them my best,” Jonny says, and then hangs up, caught back in that moment when he heard Duncs announce the dissolution of his partnership.

Jonny’s reaction now, to this news, is the right one. Jonny knows that: ungoverned emotion never helped anyone, and his reaction to Duncs’ thing was dangerous and could have gotten him noticed by someone more perceptive than Patrick. He has nothing to feel weird or bad about here. And he doesn’t feel bad—but there’s a little niggling thing that says he should, and he doesn’t like it.

It’s good, that he doesn’t feel bad, and even better that David and Christine won’t. They don’t need that kind of pain in their lives.

***

That night, the Hawks lose two-three to the Isles and break their streak.

 _That’s that,_ Jonny thinks after the game. This is why it’s important to be on the pills: this would have felt terrible three weeks ago. As it is, he can move on and focus on what he needs to do better next time. 

Still, he must still have a bit of weirdness going on, because he feels distracted during the next day’s game. He plays okay, and they beat the Flames two-one, but that night, when he and Patrick are sitting on his couch, watching highlights, he says, “Have you ever thought about having kids?”

Patrick startles a little. “Huh?”

Jonny bites his lip. He didn’t mean to say that. But he keeps thinking about everything that happened yesterday: the game, the phone call. He’s been poking at them like a tooth that used to be sore, surprised when he doesn’t find any pain, and it’s making him think about things he doesn’t want to think about.

He opens his mouth to take the question back, but before he can, Patrick says, “Actually, no.”

“No?”

“No, I haven’t thought about having kids.” Patrick pauses. “I don’t want to have them, I mean.”

Jonny frowns. He didn’t mean to start this conversation, exactly, but now he’s curious. “Really? Not even when you have a partner?”

Patrick shakes his head. “I’m pretty sure not.”

“Why not?” Jonny asks, and Patrick shoots him a look, like he’s trying to decide if he should answer. It makes Jonny sit up straighter, like he’s trying to be worthy of it.

“It’s a long story,” is what Patrick says finally. He elbows Jonny. “Why, you thinking about it?”

“No, it’s just—I don’t know,” Jonny says. “It was just on my mind, because David and Christine lost their baby yesterday.”

The guardedness falls out of Patrick’s face. “Oh. Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I guess it just made me think about it,” Jonny says. “What it would be like.” That’s not quite what he’s been thinking about, but it’s close enough.

Patrick’s quiet for a long time, not quite looking at the basketball highlights now showing on TV. Jonny feels oddly off-balance, not sure what he’s waiting for. He looks sideways at Patrick, wondering if they’ve dropped the topic, but then Patrick draws in a breath and says, “Do you remember what it was like, when you were a kid, and you got really attached to things?”

Jonny remembers from more recently than that, though it’s hard to recall what it actually felt like now that he’s on the pills again. “Sure.”

“I had this—this bear,” Patrick says, mouth quirking a little. “Mr. Buttons, I called him, and I actually—I thought of this bear as my kid, I guess. Erica had a matching one, and we used to dress them up and shit.” He darts a glance at Jonny. “I know it’s dumb. I was really little.”

“It’s okay,” Jonny says. He’s never heard Patrick talk like this, not since they were rookies, maybe, and feeling out how to be adults on a hockey team.

“Then when I was six,” Patrick says, “there was this family down the street. I didn’t really know them, but they had a kid with health problems, and it got bad enough that they had to send him away. I remember asking my mom when he was coming back, and she said he probably wasn’t—that they couldn’t take care of him, so they would get a new kid instead. It was supposed to be a good thing, her making me feel better, but I remember—I got really upset. I was thinking about my bear, and how I would feel if someone tried to take him away and give me a new one instead.”

Jonny’s silent. His body has tensed up a little, though he’s not sure why.

“My mom explained to me that that’s not how it works with adults,” Patrick says. He’s still looking away from Jonny. “That they don’t get attached, the way kids do, and it was fine for the other family, because they wouldn’t miss the kid the way I’d miss my bear. And I know that that’s right—like, I get it, now. But I didn’t back then. I kept thinking about the bear, and my mom, and realizing that she was talking about herself, too. That she must have felt about me the way those other parents felt about their kid. Not like I did about my bear, or about my sisters, but—”

“Oh,” Jonny says. Oh. He gets what Patrick’s saying.

“I know it’s how it should be,” Patrick says. “I know it’s right that adults not feel that kind of thing. But I decided a long time ago that I don’t want to raise kids if they’re going to expect me to love them.”

It takes a long time for Patrick to look up at him again. When he does, it’s sideways, kind of shy. Jonny’s staring at him, and he’s fighting against himself—fighting against that empty space in front of him. He wants to tear through it, rip it up, find what’s hiding behind it. But it’s empty. There’s nothing to fight.

He meets Patrick’s eyes, and he wants to fight it anyway. He wants to not be like Patrick’s mom.

“Thank you for telling me,” he finally says, and Patrick nods, looks away.

The next morning, when he wakes up, Jonny doesn’t take his pill.

***

Jonny doesn’t think about it that morning. He doesn’t let himself think about it. Then later that afternoon, he’s driving back from a team meeting and has to pull to the side of the road to take deep, shaking breaths.

 _It’s okay_ , he tells himself as he grips the steering wheel and tries to regulate his breathing. _It’s just the pills wearing off._ There are going to be a lot of feelings like this over the next couple of days as the pills leave his system and oh hell, what was he thinking?

He almost goes into the bathroom to find his pill container when he gets back to his condo. It’s the smart thing to do, the way to avoid hiding ninety percent of what he feels from everyone around him for the rest of his life. But if he does—he can feel it, still, that gaping emptiness that took the place of everything he felt during those few weeks off the pills. He can’t live with that emptiness.

He does go into the bathroom, and he takes today’s pill and flushes it down the toilet.

It doesn’t come back all at once. Jonny’s on the alert for it this time like he wasn’t before, and he starts to feel the rough edges that same day: a little flare of annoyance when he can’t get the jar of pasta sauce open that night; a bump of nerves when he thinks about the game the next day. Small stuff.

He watches Patrick out of the corner of his eye the next day when they’re changing for the Wild game, feeling guilty as he does so—another feeling that’s hitting a little harder now that he’s not blocking things off. Patrick’s chest is as well-formed as it ever was, his eyes as blue, but Jonny doesn’t feel anything about them. He will, he tells himself, and ignores the voice that tells him not to look forward to it. The voice that tells him it’s the worst thing he could feel. He’s ignoring that voice now.

It takes two more days—it takes until they have an off-day, and Patrick shows up at his condo ten a.m. with two steaming cups of coffee. Jonny opens the door to his dimpled smile and feels his chest inflate like he’s breathing in fire.

He can’t look away. Patrick comes in and throws his scarf over the back of a kitchen chair and starts talking about his sister’s new partner and Jonny can’t take his eyes off him. He wants to kiss Patrick’s chapped lips. He wants to touch his cheek where it’s pink from the cold. He wants to tell him that his sister’s partner will be good to her, of course he will; no one could ever hurt a Kane.

“So?” Patrick says, and Jonny realizes he’s zoned out.

“Huh?” he says.

Patrick rolls his eyes. “Are we going, or what?”

Jonny takes a moment to remember what Patrick’s talking about. Then he gives a belated laugh. “Only you would want to go skating outside, in public, on our day off.”

“Hey, gotta give the people what they want,” Patrick says, with a ridiculous shoulder shimmy, and Jonny laughs again out of the pure happiness bubbling up in his throat. This is what he’s chosen.

They go skating, crowding onto the rink at Millennium Park with the tourists and the parents and the little kids who are too young to be in school yet. Jonny takes Patrick’s hand sometimes as they go around, and no one needs to know the warm thrill that rises in his chest as he does it. No one here could even guess.

“Maybe we should learn how to do that,” Patrick says, looking at the figure skaters practicing in the protected areas. A guy is lifting a girl above his head, her back arching into an impossible pose.

“You think you can bend like that?” Jonny asks.

“Um, I would be the one lifting you, obviously,” Patrick says.

Jonny laughs. “You’re like two feet shorter than I am.”

“Four inches,” Patrick says, but he doesn’t sound very annoyed about it. He—he can’t sound very annoyed about it.

That’s how things will be, Jonny realizes, and it hits him with a jolt he hadn’t expected. Patrick will never be very annoyed—or very angry, or very excited, or very happy—about anything.

It doesn’t matter. Jonny knew what he was getting into, when he chose to feel this instead of feeling nothing. He knew Patrick would never feel any of this back.

“It’s all about the muscle,” Patrick’s saying, and he flexes in his big puffy coat until Jonny catches at his hand again, letting himself smile a little.

It’s a week before Christmas, and everything is fine.

***

Two days later, they lose in a shootout to the Blue Jackets and Jonny almost breaks his stick against the boards.

He catches himself before he slams it down, ends up just jerking it through the air. But the amount of anger he feels is terrifying. He clenches his hands around the stick and tries calm himself down, but he doesn’t know how to get rid of the rage choking his throat.

“You all right there, Toes?” Sharpy says.

Jonny can do this. He can answer like he still has his equilibrium. “Yeah, just lost my footing for a sec,” he says, adjusting his stance on his skates like that’ll help Sharpy buy it.

It’s the first time he’s really been mad since going off the pills. It’s worse than it was the first time around: he still had some of the drug in his system then, probably. This time, there’s nothing protecting him from anything.

They fly back to Chicago after the game. Jonny’s already added the meditation back into his schedule, but he’s riding the fear from after the game, and he sits down at his laptop to try to find something better.

He types in “unbalanced emotions support forum,” but where he ends up is a naturalist site.

He doesn’t realize it right away. When he does, he almost clicks back. Naturalists aren’t—they live in weird communes and opt out of normal life and get raided by police. They stage disgusting protests where people do things in public that haven’t happened in forty years, and they shout obscenities and have their own babies and don’t—

They don’t take pills.

Jonny bites his lip. He doesn’t want to live his life the way they do. He wants to stay here in Chicago, playing hockey and being normal and not letting anyone see. But he also doesn’t want to take pills, and he guesses, by definition, that makes him a naturalist.

He ends up staying reading their entire primer and most of the associated links. They have stuff about meditation, like the site he found before, but it’s couched in different language: how to moderate an emotion so it’s something you can live with, not make it go away entirely. How to disguise it so that no one around suspects you’re feeling it.

He’s surprised by that last one—he wouldn’t have thought naturalists cared about fitting in. They never seem to at their protests. But the last section of the primer is all about secrecy. The site seems to assume most of its readers are living among normal society, and it offers commandments for keeping their new “commitment to emotions” secret. Keep filling your pill prescription. Don’t leave any naturalist literature lying around. Always erase your browser history.

Jonny doesn’t even know how to erase his browser history. He’s never had anything he wanted to hide. But he googles it, and then he does it, all evidence of his time on the naturalist site washed away from his computer.

When he lies down to sleep, though, it’s all there in his mind, swirling around. He tries out one of his new breathing techniques, but it’s a while before he manages to fall asleep.

***

The new techniques aren’t any more perfect than the last set. _The point is not to repress emotion, but to live in it,_ Jonny repeats to himself, and feels an automatic flash of guilt for reciting a maxim for naturalists before he remembers that that’s him, now. It says so, right on the home page of the site: naturalists are those who are committed to living life without emotion blockers. Jonny can’t deny that that’s him.

He’s getting worse at denying a lot of things lately.

He wishes sometimes that he’d stayed as numb to the sight of Patrick’s bare chest as he had been right after going off the pills. Only sometimes—when he thinks about going back on them, something in him instantly revolts. But it’s definitely not convenient, wanting to stare at Patrick’s body while he changes in front of twenty other guys. It makes Jonny hot and breathless and in need of sitting down to disguise the ways his body is responding.

They day after they play the Blue Jackets, they shut out the Leafs at home. Patrick has a killer game, two assists and infinite sick passes that Jonny can’t stop watching, and when they finally get to the locker room, Jonny’s flying on it. He can’t tamp down the smile he gives Patrick, and Patrick’s beaming back the way he always does, and when Jonny throws his arms around him he feels like his skin is going to ignite.

“Huh?” Patrick says when Jonny jerks back, too quickly to be normal.

“Nothing,” Jonny says, trying to hide the way he’s panting suddenly. His cock is painfully hard inside his cup, and he wants to shove Patrick against the lockers and… “Sick game.”

“You know it,” Patrick says, shooting him finger guns, and Jonny wants to put his hands on him so badly he can’t even speak.

“Your place?” Patrick says a few minutes later, when they’ve both changed and talked to the press.

Jonny looks down at him and thinks, _yes, always_ , so hard he’s dizzy with it, and what he says is, “Actually, can we raincheck? I think I’m about to fall asleep standing up.”

It’s a bad excuse; they hang out after games no matter how tired they are, usually. Jonny can see in Patrick’s face that he’s disappointed. But he can’t be very hurt by it; he can’t be very hurt, period. “Yeah, okay,” Patrick says. “We’re still on for Christmas, right?”

Jonny’s family is coming down for the Winnipeg game on the twenty-third and hanging around through Christmas morning. Patrick’s supposed to join them; his family often doesn’t make it down, and he’s spent lots of Christmases over at Jonny’s. Jonny doesn’t want to think about Christmas with his family, though—not while he’s this desperate to get his mouth on Patrick’s skin. “Yeah, of course,” he says, and gets out of there before he does something he’ll regret.

His cock is still mostly hard in his jeans when he gets back to his place. He hasn’t touched himself since he went off the pills again, and he has the vague feeling that maybe it’s a bad idea. It could…he doesn’t know: it could make it harder to keep his equilibrium in public or something, if he gives into this feeling. But his cock is throbbing at him that it’s a very good idea indeed, and he gives in and goes back onto the naturalist site from the other day.

There’s a section on sex he noticed but didn’t look at the first time. There’s a bunch of stuff on reproduction he ignores; he knows enough about pre-reform biology to know he’s not going to make a baby on his own. But there’s a section below it called “If you’re starting out solo…” and he clicks on it.

Twenty minutes later, Jonny’s staring at the streaks of his own come, stretching so far up the bed they almost hit the computer screen where one guy still has his mouth around the other guy’s cock, holy _fuck_.

Okay, so that’s…a thing that exists on the internet.

Jonny’s heard of porn before. It’s a word people say sometimes when they talk about the excesses of the pre-reform era. But he never thought there would be actual videos of people…doing stuff like that, to each other, and that you can watch it. He wonders who these guys are: whether they’re part of the naturalist movement—they must be—and whether they’re afraid of getting in trouble for being in this video, even though you can’t see their faces. He wonders how many more videos there are like this.

He double checks that he can erase this from his browser history, and then he clicks on another one.

***

Jonny finally goes to sleep a few hours later, body tingling from the orgasms. That’s a word he learned from the naturalist site: _orgasm,_ and _come,_ and _jerk off_. He learned a lot of words, and he’s not sure he can keep them straight yet, but he likes them.

This is good, he thinks when he sees Patrick at practice the next morning. This is a way to keep these feelings under control, so that he can be around Patrick and not doing anything that will drive him away forever. He can take those feelings and deal with them on his own.

Still, he feels guilty about those same feelings later that afternoon, when the two of them have worked out with Shawzy and Seabs and then split off for some video games on Jonny’s couch. Patrick’s leaning against Jonny’s side while they wait for the game to load, and it’s nothing he wouldn’t have done before, but it shivers through Jonny’s body in a totally different way than it would have then.

It feels different than it did when the pills weren’t working, too. Then, Jonny would have made it stop if he’d known how. This time it’s voluntary, and it feels a little like he’s taking something from Patrick without his knowledge. It’s enough to make him think fleetingly, again, about going back on the pills—but then he’d be taking something from himself, in a different way. He can’t go back to that emptiness.

“Are we starting, or what?” Patrick mumbles sleepily into his shoulder, and Jonny looks up at the TV, where the start menu is displayed.

“Unless you’re going to fall asleep on me,” Jonny says.

“Mm,” Patrick says, like he’s thinking about it, and the hum buzzes against Jonny’s skin right above his collar bone and sends a flare of pleasure through his belly.

It’s okay. This is the kind of situation jerking off was made for.

He does so, later, and he doesn’t mean to think of Patrick while he does, but he has his hand slicked with lotion and he’s getting to the part where his breath is coming fast and every stroke of his hand feels like magic, and he imagines what it would be like if it were Patrick’s cock under his hand instead. If Patrick were lying next to him, lips parted, letting out these breathy sounds Jonny can hear coming from his own throat.

Patrick would never have felt anything like this before. Jonny’s hand on his cock would be a revelation. It would make him throw his head back, make him moan with pleasure, send fire racing through his veins until he—

Except that it wouldn’t.

That’s enough to have Jonny’s hand faltering on his cock. Patrick wouldn’t feel anything like that. Jonny’s had a cock his whole life, and touching it has never been anything but boring before this fall. Rubbing Patrick’s cock like this wouldn’t make him feel anything except…except for the chafing Jonny felt before he figured out about lotion.

But—but fantasy Patrick, the one in Jonny’s head: he feels the same things Jonny does when their eyes meet. The fizzy, melting feeling in Jonny’s stomach is in Patrick’s, too. Patrick feels his balls tighten, thrusts his hips up in to Jonny’s hand, turns his head and reaches out because he wants to be kissing Jonny when he finishes—

Jonny spurts into his hand, mouth open and gasping, other hand reaching for a body that isn’t there. Could never possibly be there.

Fuck. Fuck, he just did that.

Patrick would be so disgusted if he knew. He probably wouldn’t even understand what Jonny was doing, but that just makes it worse. Jonny can’t do this to him. There’s no way Patrick would want it.

But if he did…

For just a moment, without the haze of arousal over his mind, Jonny lets himself imagine it. What it would be like, if Patrick wanted him, too—if he were capable of wanting something like this, and he wanted it with Jonny. The way Patrick might roll close to him right now, might put a hand on Jonny’s face, might kiss him softly. It takes Jonny’s breath away. It makes him ache.

But he doesn’t get to have that. There are some things he doesn’t get to choose.

***

His family is waiting for him outside the locker room after the Winnipeg game the next night. They lost one to five, which has Jonny in a foul mood, but he tries to put his new naturalist training into practice and keep an even expression as he steps out to greet them.

“Where are David and Christine?” he asks after he hugs his parents.

His parents exchange a glance. “We were thinking about surprising you,” she says. “But they’re meeting us back at your place. They have a new baby with them.”

For a moment Jonny can only gape. Then he remembers that he’s not supposed to be showing stuff like that and pulls his jaw back up to a normal position. “They—really? Already?”

Jonny’s a complicated mess on the drive home. It’s a good thing Patrick’s there, twisting around in the front seat to chat with his parents, because Jonny’s too caught up in his own thoughts to be any help. Jonny just—he keeps thinking about things. How excited he is that David and Christine get to have this. The stuff Patrick told him the night before he went off the pills. His own thoughts, about David getting everything he wanted and not having it matter to him.

Then he opens his condo door to see his little brother standing there holding a baby, and all his thoughts go out the window.

He hasn’t seen a baby since being off the pills. Not up close like this; not a baby who’s in his own family. She’s so trusting and soft and curls up so easily in his arms, like she was made to be there. Jonny can’t look away.

“Careful,” his dad says, laughing. “You guys might never get Ella back.”

That makes Jonny’s head snap up. “You named her—”

“Well, yeah, she’s the replacement,” David says, and he comes to take her back. Jonny’s arms tighten instinctively around her.

It’s only for a moment, and then David’s there and Jonny lets him take her out of his arms. But he doesn’t want to let her go. He never thought there would be something he wouldn’t trust his little brother with.

Patrick is there when Jonny steps back, bumping their shoulders together. Jonny knows he can’t mean it as comfort—can’t have any idea that Jonny would need comfort right now—but he’s fiercely glad of it anyway.

Jonny spends a lot of time holding Ella over the next day and a half. She’s so tiny, and he should probably let her parents get used to taking care of her, but they’ll have their turn. This is Jonny’s time.

He just never knew he would feel like this with a baby in his arms. Even when she’s crying for no reason or spewing disgusting liquids, he wants as much of her as he can get. He’s annoyed when he has to put her down for a nap the next afternoon, while his parents and David and Christine are out touring the city, because it’s cutting into his time with her.

“You’re gonna get one of those someday soon,” Patrick says from behind him while Jonny stands in the doorway of the spare room, watching Ella sleep in her carrier on the bed.

Jonny startles a little. He knew Patrick was in the condo—he came over for lunch a couple hours ago—but he didn’t know he was so close. He probably wouldn’t have been so obvious with his feelings if he had.

“Not you, though,” he says, in an attempt to deflect, and then feels bad for bringing up what was obviously a serious conversation as banter like this.

Patrick doesn’t look bothered—of course he doesn’t; Jonny has to keep reminding himself that Patrick isn’t like him. It’s so easy to forget. “Yup, not me. I’m only here because your parents didn’t think I was cool enough to come to the Art Institute with them.”

Jonny laughs, quietly.

He knows Patrick was joking about not wanting to be here, but it’s still a shock an hour or so later when Jonny comes back from doing laundry—babies generate a lot of laundry, apparently—to find Patrick standing in the middle of the spare room, holding Ella.

Patrick doesn’t see him at first. He’s looking down at the baby, rocking her back and forth and making little cooing noises. She’s waving a hand over her head, and Patrick laughs and bends down so that she can bat at his cheek.

Jonny makes a noise. He’s not sure what noise, except that it’s involuntary. Patrick looks up, startled, and meets Jonny’s gaze.

Jonny tries to come up with something to say, but he can’t speak for the wanting.

“She woke up,” Patrick says softly, and Jonny still can’t speak.

He’ll never have this. No matter what Patrick said earlier, Jonny knows he’ll never have this for himself. He doesn’t even have to think about that; it seems obvious that he can’t apply for a partner when their feelings will never match his. Right now, that fact doesn’t feel significant compared to the knowledge that he’ll never have this, specifically: Patrick, holding a baby that’s theirs in a home that belongs to the two of them; Patrick, his.

“Do you want me to…?” Patrick says, holding her out.

“No,” Jonny says. He clears his throat. “No, she looks happy there.”

Patrick ducks his head and gives her a tiny smile.

It’s a good thing Jonny doesn’t have a baby. His heart would crack from feeling this way all the time.

***

Patrick stays over for Christmas Eve dinner. He’s done that a bunch of times in the past, but Jonny’s doubly glad of it this year: it feels right, to have all his people in the room with him. Right, even if he can’t take Patrick’s hand and kiss his knuckles the way he wants to when Patrick laughs with David during dinner.

The next morning, they all open presents in front of the tree, and Jonny tries to be content with the way David and Christine smile when they open the baby clothes for Ella, even though he knows they’re not feeling the kind of excitement he wants them to be. There’s a little part of him that wants to think of a way to talk to David about the pills—see if he can at least get him to think about living without them. Give David at least a chance to look at Ella and feel the way Jonny does, even once. But he doesn’t think he could do it without losing everything.

His mom sits down next to him while his dad opens some presents and puts an arm around him. “I’m so proud of everything you’ve done here,” she says, and Jonny knows she doesn’t mean it the way he wants her to, with the same depth, but he chokes up a little anyway.

“Thanks, Mom,” he says. He leans into her and thinks about Patrick’s realization about his parents when he was a kid. Jonny’s twenty years older than Patrick was, and he’s known how things work for years, but there’s still something small and tight and cold in the bottom of his stomach. He focuses on the warmth of her arm around him and sets the rest aside to deal with later.

His parents have to work the next day, so they’re all flying out Christmas evening. Jonny spends a long time holding Ella before they leave for the airport. He takes her into a corner of the dining room, away from everyone else packing things up in the foyer, and he looks into her wide dark eyes and breathes in the smell of her forehead. “I know you don’t understand me yet,” he whispers. “But I just want you to know, when you’re old enough that it means something to you, that there’s someone who loves you so, so much.”

Ella makes a vague gurgling sound. Jonny doesn’t want to stop holding her.

He has to, eventually; David and Christine walk out with the carrier, and he hugs his parents, and then it’s just him and Patrick.

Jonny’s condo is a mess, but it’s a nice mess: wrappers strewn everywhere, the lights on the Christmas tree making everything look rosy and warm. Jonny’s feeling too exhausted to clean up anything right now, and he and Patrick sit on the couch in the midst of the chaos, Patrick leaning kind of sideways against Jonny’s shoulder and listing the reasons why he thinks Ella might actually be Jonny’s progeny due to secret sperm harvesting.

His hair is in Jonny’s face and his hands are flying in the air as he talks and he’s being ridiculous and Jonny can’t believe that Patrick doesn’t feel the clench in his chest that Jonny does at moments like this. It feels like so much has changed between them over the past few months, and Jonny knows the changes are all inside of him—that he’s not behaving significantly differently, that Patrick probably wouldn’t notice even if he were—but it feels like things are totally new between them. Like something has grown between them, rising slowly but surely, and now Jonny’s drowning in it.

Maybe that’s why he does what he does: because he’s in so deep he can’t breathe anymore without breathing in Patrick. They’re sitting there on the couch, Patrick with his knees up, leaning against Jonny and going on about Ella, and Jonny never wants this to end. “And, I mean, look at the way she was studying the tree,” Patrick says, ticking off a point. “She obviously had a lot to criticize about it. Tell me that’s not an inherited Jonny trait, because if you ask me…”

“You are such a—a twit,” Jonny says, laughing, and Patrick turns to give him a swift grin, their faces so close to each other, and Jonny just—

He’s kissing Patrick before he knows what he’s doing. He’s pressing into that soft warm wet mouth he hasn’t been able to stop staring at, breathing in Patrick’s heat, and the next moment he’s jerking back, doused in sharp acrid panic.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, scrambling up and off the couch. “I’m so—”

Patrick is staring at him in shock. Jonny can’t come up with anything to say, can’t find an explanation that doesn’t ruin everything, and so he turns and runs.

***

Jonny makes it down to the street even though his hands are shaking so much he can barely press the elevator buttons. He has a coat, he has keys in his pocket, he has shoes on his feet, and that’s pretty much all a miracle, since he’s basically walking blindly.

He stumbles down the street in the dark. He can’t go too far. He can’t be seen. He just—oh God. He just kissed Patrick.

It happened so fast. Jonny was planning to never do anything like that, planning to keep all of this in his head, and then Patrick’s mouth was right there with his lips parted and smiling and Jonny is such an idiot.

This is why people go on the pills. So they don’t do stupid things like this.

Jonny stops and breathes in deep, closing his eyes and feeling the breath shudder into his lungs. He has to go back. Maybe there’s a way he can play this off. He has to—

Fuck. What if Patrick’s telling someone?

He wouldn’t do that. Probably. He wouldn’t want to do anything to ruin Jonny’s life. But what if Patrick doesn’t get the significance; what if he’s confused? Or he wants a second opinion? He could call Sharpy or one of his sisters and—

Jonny has to go back. That’s the only way to control this.

He’s breathing hard by the time he gets to his lobby. Then he stops in the middle of the lobby floor, because he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s going to say. There’s no way to pretend it didn’t happen, probably. But maybe it could be—a joke? Maybe he saw people doing it, kissing, and he was just curious to know what the fuss was about. It doesn’t have to be a thing he actually wanted.

That sounds weak, even in his own head. But the doorman is starting to give him looks, so he gets into the elevator.

His palms are sweating on the way up. Jonny presses them to his thighs, tries to dry them on his jeans. He just needs to be chill about this. Patrick isn’t going to expect him to have feelings for him; Jonny can tell him some half-truths, and they’ll get past this.

Patrick won’t leave him. This won’t be enough to make Patrick leave him.

Jonny presses his forehead against the wood of his front door for a long moment. Then he unlocks it and goes in.

“Hey,” he says, injecting a smile into his voice. “Sorry about that. It was just something weird I wanted to—”

Patrick looks up from the couch, and there are tears on his face.

“Hey,” Jonny says in a totally different voice, hurrying over. “What’s—”

But Patrick’s turning away. “Sorry, it’s—nothing,” he says. “I just—I ate something spicy, and it was—”

“Hey,” Jonny says. “Hey, no.” He sits down next to Patrick, close enough their knees are touching, and he touches Patrick’s chin and turns it back towards him. Patrick’s eyes are red, and there are still tears spilling out of them, spiking his eyelashes and running down his cheeks.

Patrick’s crying.

Patrick’s eyes catch his and hold. Jonny’s never seen an adult cry before. Patrick looks—he looks frightened, and defensive, and like everything Jonny’s ever wanted to look at and protect. Jonny raises a hand to his cheek and brushes the tears from under his eye. Then he leans down and presses his lips to Patrick’s.

The kiss is salty this time, wet with Patrick’s tears. Patrick makes a wondering sound into it, and then he pulls away.

“Jonny,” he says, and he sounds breathless. His eyes are shut, eyelashes wet and clumping together. “What is this?”

“I don’t know,” Jonny says. He feels wild. He’s amazed he can still breathe. “Do you want this?”

“Do I— _Jonny,_ ” Patrick says, and then he’s kissing Jonny, a press of lips that’s different than when Jonny initiated it. It takes Jonny a moment to react before he opens his mouth against Patrick’s.

Patrick only kisses him for a second more before he breaks away. “I don’t understand,” he says. “What…”

Jonny doesn’t, either. “My pills stopped working this fall,” he says, and Patrick starts to laugh.

He laughs long enough that Jonny starts to be alarmed, starts to think about moving away, but Patrick grabs at him and rests his head against Jonny’s chest, still laughing. “Jonny,” he says, his voice hiccuping out of him. “Jonny, Jonny.”

“Yeah,” Jonny says, alarmed. His mouth is dry, his hands resting on Patrick’s sides, and he has no idea what to do with this.

Patrick looks up, laughter still in his face and his eyes still full of tears. “Jonny,” he says, “I’ve been off the pills for _fourteen years,_ ” and he grabs Jonny’s face and kisses him again, fiercely.

It takes a while for his words to sink in; Jonny’s a little distracted, what with Patrick kissing him and all. Jonny’s never had anyone’s mouth against his like this. It’s remaking his body, giving him new skin, and then Patrick does a thing with his tongue that’s—

“Hang on,” Jonny says, panting as he pulls away before he reaches the point where he can’t. “What do you—fourteen years?”

Patrick makes a frustrated noise and tries to climb into Jonny’s lap. “Can we just—”

He’s desperate and clumsy in a way Jonny’s never seen him before. “Hey, whoa,” Jonny says, and Patrick ends up sideways in his lap, shaking under Jonny’s hands. He’s gripping Jonny’s shirt and pressing his head against Jonny’s shoulder while he takes shuddering breaths and Jonny doesn’t know what to do: just runs his hands over Patrick’s back, tries to hold on as much as possible.

“Jonny,” Patrick says into the skin of his neck, “take me to bed?”

Jonny’s all too willing.

***

They hold onto each other down the hall, and once they get to Jonny’s room Patrick breaks away from his hold and strips his shirt over his head. Jonny stares at Patrick’s bare chest, at the little raised buds of his nipples on the curves of his pecs, and can’t believe this is real. He keeps expecting someone to take it away.

“Your turn,” Patrick says, coming so close that Jonny can feel his body like an electric field. Jonny pulls his shirt off, getting a little tangled on the way, and when it’s off Patrick’s face has grown serious, his eyes trained on Jonny’s chest like he’s never seen it before. He runs his hand down the sparse line of hair between Jonny’s pecs, making Jonny shiver, and then he leans up and kisses him.

Patrick’s body fits against his so well. It’s a new thing, two bodies pressed together along their full lengths like this. Jonny wraps his arms around Patrick’s waist and lifts him onto his toes a little as their mouths meet. It’s such a revelation, having Patrick’s tongue in his mouth. Jonny can’t get over it. 

When Patrick pulls away a couple of minutes later, Jonny follows with his mouth, and they end up with their foreheads pressed together, panting.

“I used to, like, rehearse how I would tell you this,” Patrick says in a low voice, hands tight on Jonny’s hips. “I had so many different ways to do it. I never thought it would actually happen.”

Jonny puts his hand on Patrick’s waist, that slight dip, thick with muscle and soft under his hand, and uses it to pull Patrick closer.. “What did you rehearse?”

“How to tell you I wanted to kiss you,” Patrick says, and his cheeks go pink, even though their mouths are so close they’re practically kissing now. Jonny has to kiss him again for that, presses his lips to Patrick’s and feels them give.

“I shouldn’t, even,” Patrick says, drawing back. He puts a hand on the back of Jonny’s neck and grips it a little desperately. “Jonny, Jonny, if you’re gonna find new pills…”

“I’m not,” Jonny says. It sounds completely ridiculous, now that he’s standing here with Patrick hot and breathless in his arms, the idea that he would. “They didn’t, um—they did stop working. But then they started again, and…I stopped taking them.”

Patrick blinks at him, and then laughs again. “God, that explains so much. You’ve been driving me crazy…”

Jonny presses his nose against Patrick’s cheek. “Likewise,” he whispers.

“Fuck, Jonny,” Patrick says, and his mouth finds Jonny’s again, and this time when he presses up against him Jonny can feel how hard Patrick is in his pants. He feels blind with want, clumsy with it.

Patrick’s fingers fumble with his fly. Jonny’s fingers are worse on Patrick’s, shaking so much he can barely get it open. Then their pants are down, Patrick’s cock a jutting shape under cotton boxers, and Jonny can barely breathe.

Patrick touches his fingertips to the front of Jonny’s briefs. Jonny feels the touch rocket through his cock, his balls, up through his stomach and down to his toes.

“Jonny,” Patrick says, and Jonny would let Patrick stand there and say his name like that forever.

They end up on the bed, Patrick on top of Jonny, Jonny’s cock hard and swollen and skidding wetly against the skin of Patrick’s stomach. Patrick’s making these little gasping sounds, kissing Jonny’s chest and licking his nipples and making his hips jerk.

“Patrick,” Jonny says, gulping at air. His fingers scrabble at Patrick’s back. “I don’t know how to…”

“Sh. I’ll show you,” Patrick says, coming up to frame Jonny’s face in his hands and kiss him deep. Then he slides his hips forward so that their cocks rub together and colored lights explode in front of Jonny’s eyes.

Jonny never imagined anything like this. This is nothing like touching himself. Patrick’s ass is firm and round under Jonny’s hands, and he makes really satisfying high-pitched noises when Jonny grabs it and uses it to grind his hips down harder. Patrick’s fingers skitter over Jonny’s chest, tweaking the nipples that are still wet with his spit. Jonny remembers, vaguely, imagining himself being the one to take Patrick apart, but he’s the one who’s falling to pieces. He can’t even think, for the wonder of Patrick above and around him.

“So good, Jonny,” Patrick grates out, like it’s been torn from him, and his cock rocks against Jonny’s and makes his eyes cross. Jonny’s holding on wherever he can, grabbing at as much of Patrick as possible; he’s kissing him fiercely, wanting everything out of that chapped pink mouth, and their skin is getting slick with sweat.

“I want,” Jonny mumbles, not even sure what he’s saying, and he’s bucking up, grinding up against Patrick desperately. Patrick cries out and arches his back, his hips jerking out of rhythm. Jonny moves faster against him, harder, trying to get more of that feeling, there—crashes his mouth up against Patrick’s and—

Patrick goes rigid first, eyes fluttering and mouth falling open. Jonny feels the hot wet shoots of come on his stomach, and that’s it for him. He’s gone, tipping over, throwing his head back and shouting as he spills all over himself.

He goes limp on the sheets and pulls Patrick in immediately—doesn’t care about the way their stomachs squelch together, or their limbs are slick with sweat. It’s Patrick. Jonny wants to hold him forever.

Patrick’s chest is moving fast against his. It slows down gradually as Jonny holds him. Jonny feels his own body coming down, easing into something closer to normal. It’s not normal, though. It’s all new. His limbs are tingling, like they did after his other orgasms, but it’s so different this time. Patrick’s here. Jonny can run a hand up his back, feel all that skin and muscle, trace over the delicate bones at the top of his spine.

Patrick’s face is so close to his. Jonny touches it—the soft spot next to his nose where his cheek curves into it; the dip of bone where his eyebrow meets his temple; the full swell of his bottom lip. Looks at Patrick’s eyes and finds them on him, clear and blue. “I never thought I would get to touch you,” Jonny says. “I never thought you would—feel things like this.”

Patrick huffs a little laugh. “ _You_ didn’t,” he says. “I thought—fuck, Jonny, you were so…you kept saying things, and looking at me, and I told myself not to be dumb, but it felt different than it ever had. And then it didn’t anymore, and I was so confused.”

“Sorry I put you through that,” Jonny murmurs, half-kissing Patrick already, and Patrick just gives a strangled laugh and makes it a full kiss. Warm and wet and real.

Jonny can this whenever he wants. He can—he can have a lifetime of this.

“So you…you went off the pills when you were a kid?” Jonny asks.

Patrick leans his head on the pillow next to Jonny’s and takes a slow breath. “I never wanted to be on the pills,” he says. “Not even when I was a kid.”

“Yeah?” Jonny tries to imagine Patrick as a kid. He would have had so much energy. So much feeling spilling over onto everything.

“I remember the night before I turned ten,” Patrick says. “I looked at Erica and I thought, I won’t care about her like this tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Jonny makes a sound without meaning to. 

“I didn’t really know what it would be like,” Patrick says, “but I was scared of it. And the next day I wasn’t scared anymore. I was just…nothing.”

Jonny knows that feeling. Remembers it, from going back on the pills and looking at Patrick. He finds Patrick’s hand and tangles their fingers together.

“I hated it,” Patrick mumbles. “I couldn’t even hate anything properly but I hated that. I hated not being able to hate it.”

“So you stopped?” Jonny asks.

Patrick’s lips quirk. “Well, it took me two years to figure out that was an option. But yeah, then I started flushing my pills down the toilet.”

“At twelve,” Jonny says. Jesus. He can’t imagine trying to hide his feelings when he was twelve. “How did you even…”

“Not all that well,” Patrick says. He looks sheepish. “Why do you think I got in so much trouble with Deadspin my first couple of years in the League?”

Jonny gapes at him for a second. And then he laughs, and leans forward to kiss his mouth.

“It’s worth it, though?” he asks a minute later.

Patrick hmms against his mouth. “I mean, I don’t regret it. But, like…I can look at Erica and feel the way I used to now. But she’s never gonna feel that way about me.”

Jonny tightens his hand on Patrick’s. “I will, though,” he says. “That’s, uh…that’s why I went off the pills, actually.”

“Yeah?” Patrick says.

“Because…” It’s hard to say the words. Hard to make his throat work properly. “Because I didn’t want to look at you and not, uh. Not feel the way I did when the pills weren’t working.”

Patrick looks at him in surprise, and then a slow smile grows on his face. “Yeah? And how was that, exactly?”

“I, um.” Jonny bites his lip. Patrick’s smile widens, dimpling his cheeks, and he moves a hand to rub at Jonny’s nipple. Jonny gasps as the sensation shoots all the way down to his toes, with a major stop in between. “I, uh, yeah.”

Patrick’s smile is so dirty. “Yeah? Did you think about me like…this?”

“Yeah,” Jonny says on a gasp. He can feel his cock stirring, trying to get hard again sooner than is possible. “But, um, no.” He closes his hand over Patrick’s to make him stop rubbing. “That’s not what—I mean, it wasn’t sex stuff. That’s not why I stopped.”

Patrick’s face softens “No?”

Jonny presses his lips together against the tidal wave of feeling rising in his chest. He just—it’s too much. “No, it was,” he says, and then he can’t say any more. It’s such an old-fashioned word. He can’t—can’t just bring it out like that. He can’t.

Patrick must take pity on him, because he leans in and kisses him gently on the lips. Then he pulls back and looks in Jonny’s eyes and says, “I love you.”

Jonny gasps. “I—yeah,” he manages to get out, eyes darting away from Patrick’s and Patrick must get what he means, because his face comes to life, impossibly beautiful, and Jonny has to pull him in again. This, this boy, this impossible, beautiful man. Jonny can’t say it yet, but he loves him.

***

Jonny thinks that’s it for revelations for a while, but he finds out he was wrong two days later. They’re in Denver to play the Avs, and Jonny still feels like he’s floating, half the time; Patrick has to step on his foot a lot in public so Jonny doesn’t “spill his feelings everywhere, jeez.” He’s finally gotten Patrick into their hotel room after the game and is sucking on his earlobe in reward for a gorgeous pair of goals when Patrick pulls himself away.

“Okay,” he says. “More of that after I make the drop.”

“The…what?” Jonny tends to be kind of out of it after touching Patrick these days, but…what?

“Gotta do my part for the resistance,” Patrick says, grinning cheekily, and wow, this is the first time Jonny’s heard about this.

“What is that?” Jonny asks, staring at the backpack he’s seen Patrick carry so many times over the years.

“You didn’t really think I was sightseeing every time I went out while we were on the road, did you?” Patrick asks. He opens the bag a little, pulls out a couple of small items, and throws them at Jonny. “Catch,” he says, and then goes out the door.

Jonny looks at what’s in his hands. It’s a little packet of something called Astroglide, and another thing called a Trojan, with a ring of plastic inside and an illustration like…

Jonny sits down on the bed with a thud.

It’s only through amazing self-control on Jonny’s part that Patrick finds him still hard when he comes back an hour later. “What, you didn’t experiment?” Patrick says, and he actually sounds a little disappointed, or is it—uncomfortable?

He takes the Trojan out of Jonny’s hand. “This one, we don’t really need,” he says. “It’s mostly useful for men and women who don’t want to explain the babies.”

Jonny’s not sure he’s even following.

“This one, though…” Patrick picks up the packet of Astroglide. He grins a little. “If you want, I can show you how to use this one?”

Jonny loves it when Patrick’s shy like this. Never expects it of him. Loves figuring out how to kiss him until he isn’t anymore.

He still has questions, though. “So, the thing with the backpack…” he says when they’re both naked, and they’ve been kissing long enough to be hard and leaking against each other.

“I travel a lot. It makes me—useful,” Patrick says, voice breaking. He brings Jonny’s hand to his ass. “Do you really want to talk right now?”

Jonny doesn’t. But when Patrick’s got Jonny’s fingers slicked up and is showing him how to use them to press him open, when Patrick’s gasping and looking up at Jonny all dazed and open-mouthed, he takes a break between gasps to say, “You can help me, if you want.”

Jonny doesn’t have to think too hard about the answer to any question Patrick asks him these days. “Yes,” he says, and leans down to kiss Patrick, twisting his fingers inside his ass until Patrick cries out and spills between them.

***

_Epilogue_

 

None of Jonny and Patrick’s teammates seem too surprised to be attending their partnership ceremony a year and a half later.

“Always knew the two of you were too codependent to partner with anyone else,” Sharpy says, making a face. Jonny ignores the face; Sharpy’s just mad that Patrick made his place card half Hawks red and half victory green.

Jonny didn’t always know they’d do this; there were a lot of lengthy discussions leading up to application process. Patrick was hesitant about the idea of applying for each, given the rejection rate for specific-partner applications. But Jonny pointed out that if they got rejected, they would be no worse off than they were now. And if they were accepted…

Well. Someday there’ll be another kind of application to submit.

Jonny looks across the hotel ballroom, to where Patrick’s chatting with some elderly family member. They won’t be able to apply for kids till after they retire. They’d never be approved while both of them are still traveling fifty percent of the year. But someday they’ll apply, and then they’ll have a baby of their own to hold. Maybe two. Maybe more, to raise secure in the knowledge that their parents love them. And until then—

Patrick looks up and meets his eyes across the ballroom. Jonny raises his glass to him and watches Patrick’s eyes crinkle into a smile. Until then, well, Jonny has more than enough to love right here.


End file.
